How To Improve Your Sales Candidate Funnel Conversion Rate

Quick tips on how sales leaders and employers can improve their sales job candidate funnels by getting rid of the fluff in their job descriptions.

Get rid of the fluff!

Lose the fluff words in your job descriptions that say you are looking for:

“Self Starters”

“Ability to demonstrate value”

“Team-oriented”

Every sales rep is going to say that they have all of those qualities anyways – so its a waste of time to even put it on the job description.

You don’t even get SEO value out of it because everyone else is writing the same thing on their job descriptions and the words lose all of their SEO value.

Your job descriptions should tell the sales rep enough information to self-screen themselves in our out of the sales job. Instead of being vague with silly phrases like the ones listed above, your Job Descriptions should be jam-packed with specificity.

Good sales reps want to know these three things about the sales job opportunties they are considering:

What is the OTE?

Your job description should be crystal clear about what the On Target Earnings (OTE) are for the sales job. Why waste 2-3 email and phone cycles with a sales candidate only to find out that the compensation you are offering is below their personal requirements? Be transparent on your job description for the role and you will save yourself (and the candidate) a lot of time.

Bonus points for you if you break down your OTE into what the Base Salary and Variable Commission are for the role.

Selling Targets

What are the selling targets for this sales job? Include the Industries, Company Size, Departments and Roles that this sales job is targeting.

Sales reps are looking for jobs that fit and match their prior experience and sales history.

There is a big difference in selling to an HR Manager in an SMB company in the Health and Beauty industry and an Enterprise sale to a Fortune 100 Software CEO.

If these details are not explicit on the job description – than you are more likely to get unqualified candidates coming through your funnel.

Product Sales Details

In the spirit of transparency – we suggest that your job descriptions include details about the Product Sales Cycle and Process.

What is the ACV (Annual Contract Value) of the product being sold?

It is a transactional sales that takes less than 30 days and can be closed in a couple of calls?

Or is it an enterprise sales process that involves multiple stakeholders and averages 6-12 months?

Do you expect the sales rep to hunt all of their leads or is their a team of SDRs (Sales Development Reps) to support the Account Executives?

If a sales candidates has no experience working with and collaborating with a Professional Service team or a Sales Engineer – chances are that you will need to invest additional resources to ramp them into the role.

These details matter to the sales candidates.

Forget the fluff and minimize the perks about bringing your dog to work and that you have a regular “beer Friday.” Save those details as you move down the hiring funnel.

Instead, focus on being transparent about the OTE, the Selling Targets and the Product Sales Details and I guarantee you that you will save unnecessary cycles and improve your sales candidate conversion rate to hire.